The Great Facebook Ad Mystery! Solved?

Recently, I was running a Facebook conversion ad to generate email opt-ins.

I was getting a 9 out of 10 relevance score with the ad which is awesome!

Having a 9-relevance score tells me that the ad copy and image are both resonating with the targeted audience. Facebook rewards ads with high relevance scores with more clicks and a lower cost per click, thus more people seeing the ad.

For instance, this ad has generated 1,236 clicks at .34 per click, which is fantastic!

The Facebook Ad Mystery

The challenge is of 1,236 clicks, only 199 people opted-in to the email list. This is a conversion rate of just 15.9%.

This conversion seems low to me for an ad with a 9-relevance score. My experience leads me to believe that the conversion rate (at least for most of the industries that I am managing ads) should be at least 30% – 40% for an ad with a 9-relevance score. Some of my ads are getting a 60% conversion rate on a regular basis, and do not have a 9-relevance score.

Normally, when ads have a low conversion rate, there is a visitor disconnect from their expectations when they click the ad and then what is actually being delivered on the landing page. This is fixed by making sure the image and the copy on the landing page match the ad.

With this particular Facebook ad what has kept my wheels turning is that the ad and the landing were almost identical.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why an ad with a 9 relevance score was getting such a low conversion rate when the ad and the landing page were practically the same.

The mystery continues and the plot thickens. When I run ads to a new lead magnet, I normally start with a click-to-website ad, before a conversion ad. Once I have generated a significant number of email opt-ins from the click to website ad, then I will switch to a conversion ad. The main reason I do this is because of how Facebook charges for the different types of ads. Click to website ads are charged on a per-impression basis, whereas a click to website ad is billed on a cost-per-click basis. If Facebook has no data on who is converting, often it is more effective from a conversion and a cost perspective to run the click to website ad first and then switch to the conversion ad once you have a significant number of conversions.

What made this ad even more perplexing is that after first running the initial click-to-website ads, the conversion ads will initially generate email opt-ins less expensively than the click to website ad.

However, for this ad, the click-to-website ad generated 146 email opt-ins at $1.99 each. The conversion ad generated leads at 190 email opt-ins at $2.74 each. This was another indicator that something was wrong with the conversion ad.

The Great Facebook Ad Mystery Continued.

After not being able to figure out what was wrong, I decided to test a second ad targeting a different interest to see if the conversion rate and cost per conversion improved.

I duplicated the ad and was browsing through the ad copy, and that’s when I noticed the problem.

Normally, I always put a link in my ad copy, because some people will read the entire ad and then click. I want a visible link for people who read the entire ad copy. For those who read the entire copy, I do not want them to have to search for a link to click. So, I always insert a link at the end of my Facebook ad text.

Other people will read part of the copy and then click the ad without reading the entire ad text. Facebook gives us a place to insert a link in case someone clicks an image or some other part of the ad. Most people just use this place to insert their link and don’t insert the link in the copy. But I do find that having the link in the text of the ad increases the number of people who click on the ad.

Identifying The Problem

For some reason, the correct link URL was in the ad copy but not for the overall ad link.

Normally, I just copy and paste the link into the two different places within the ad, so I am not sure why the link would be correct in one spot and not the other.

So, if people read the entire copy of the ad and then clicked the link, then they were taken to the landing page. If they clicked the image or some other part of the ad, then they were taken to a broken link page and never made it to the landing page. So, the only people that saw the landing page were the people that read the entire ad copy and then clicked the link.

When I look at the actual number of people who clicked the right link in the link tracking software, there are a total of 215 people that clicked the correct link in the ad copy. Compare that to the 199 people that opted-in to the list from this ad and it is a 92.5% conversion rate. That’s more like it!

The bad news is when I compared the total number of clicks 1236 to the actual number of people that clicked on the correct URL 215, only 17.4% of the people that clicked the ad saw the landing page.

This provides more evidence for my theory of low conversion rates can be caused by the ad copy not matching the audience’s expectations on the landing page. There was a huge disconnect with this broken link. Many people never made it to the landing page.

What is even more perplexing is that Facebook normally flags ads that have two or more links in the ad. So, I am not sure how this ad made it through the Facebook review process either without them catching it.

So, I fixed both links in the ad and made sure they were the correct link and then resubmitted the ad to Facebook.

Once I corrected the link in the ad, it is now getting a relevance score of 8 and has generated 351 email opt-ins at $1.17 per lead.

What lessons should we learn from solving The Great Facebook Ad Mystery?

Make sure all the links in your ad are the same and make sure there are no broken links.

Make sure that you know your numbers when managing your ads. What tipped me off to realizing the ad wasn’t working was the cost per lead of the conversion ad compared to the previous click to website ad.

Now I’m grateful that the ad is working well, and it is growing the email list. Also, I’m glad the great Facebook ad mystery has now been solved.

Did you know that there are actually 7 critical mistakes people often make with Facebook ads. Discover how to avoid these 7 critical Facebook ad mistakes by downloading Charles’ Free Report.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment

Name *

Email *

Website

Follow Us!

Characteristics of an Entrepreneur?

Have you ever thought about what are some of the characteristics of entrepreneurs?
In over 20 years of being an entrepreneur and working with many different entrepreneurs, I am often intrigued by what entrepreneur characteristics separates … Read More

What is an Entrepreneur?

What is an entrepreneur? When searching the Internet, for the definition of the word entrepreneur there are many different definitions. The entrepreneur definition that I prefer comes for Webster’s dictionary from 1986. This particular version of … Read More